Shakespeare fans know that Wittenberg is where Prince Hamlet was attending university when he had to rush back to Elsinore for his dad's funeral. Marlowe lovers may think of it as Doctor John Faustus' campus. Protestants and some Catholics may associate the school with the theses of another faculty member, Martin Luther.

Hey, weren't they all there at about the same time?

With Aurora Theatre presenting David Davalos' 2008 comedy "Wittenberg," we sent a few questions to the actor-turned-playwright who lives with his family in Boulder, Colo., or, as he says, "the People's Republic of the Front Range."

Q:What was the inspiration for "Wittenberg"?

A: I was playing Rosencrantz in "Hamlet" at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, so Guildenstern and I had loads of time to sit backstage playing cribbage and listening to the play. One detail that got stuck in my head was the repetition of Wittenberg as the university Hamlet was asking to return to. Why Wittenberg in particular? What message was Shakespeare sending his audience? And of course he's telling them that Hamlet was a student at what was at the time a hotbed of iconoclastic, unorthodox thought, the center of the Protestant challenge to the orthodoxy of the church. And regular theatergoers would also remember that "Doctor Faustus" took place there.

So that chain of connections - the triple play of Luther to Faustus to Hamlet - led me to wonder what if all three were there at the same time, influencing each other, setting each other up for the best-known parts of their respective stories.

Q:You seem to have a penchant for comic takes on Shakespeare, based on the titles of some of your early short pieces - "Willie the Slick," "Richard the Thug," "Orenthello."

A: They allowed me to play with something that fascinates me, the idea of historical analogues and echoes - what Mark Twain allegedly formulated so perfectly as, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Hunchbacked paranoid power-hungry king? Richard III, meet Richard Nixon. Celebrity mixed-race uxoricide? Othello, I believe you know O.J. I enjoy finding these echoes and amplifying them. So when I began to think about "Wittenberg" as a campus comedy, I'd already sown the field for Hamlet as a moody undergrad and varsity athlete, Faustus as a Renaissance Timothy Leary and Luther as the divinity school equivalent of "The Paper Chase's" Professor Kingsfield.

Q:How do you think this will play in the Bay Area's primary People's Republic?

A: The setting of the play feels like a good fit for Berkeley, one university with a radical history next to another.